Carnegie Mellon University has announced that it will participate in a 5-year, $5 million project that will create a large infrastructure in an effort to improve educational outcomes and advance learning.

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the project, LearnSphere, will be able to access over 550 datasets from a variety of databases, including online tutoring systems, MOOCs, and educational games, allowing instructors to improve their teachings and the learning of their students by redesigning their courses to coordinate with learning styles.

Learning models based on the wide variety of datasets housed in LearnSphere will enable new forms of personalized, just-in-time support for learning.

Americans have flocked to colleges in unprecedented numbers in the last half-decade, fueled by a conviction that postsecondary education is the surest route to steady employment and higher salaries.

Yet those who begin, but don’t complete, are learning the hard way that the payoff is in finishing—or that they might have been better off not attending college at all. Adults age 20-24 with some college experience don't fare much better than peers who just have high-school diplomas.

The rise of vocational certifications in subjects like computer programming and manufacturing can lead to well-paying jobs and prove that a bachelor’s degree isn’t the only path to success, some labor economists say.

Imagine a teaching assistant who’s always awake, always hooked into the latest information and who always explains its reasoning with pinpoint precision. That’s how IBM envisions its cognitive computing system, named Watson, being used to help teachers in the future.

Teachers would ask the program questions, and it would draw on information from massive databases, scientific journals and other educational materials to formulate its answers.

"It's not about replacing teachers but giving them a lever to do their jobs far more effectively," said Michael D. King, vice president of Global Education Industry at IBM. The technology could provide teachers with instant guidance on lesson plans and classroom strategies or help them discover new ways of measuring student progress.

American students – and any other students, for that matter – can now attend public German universities for free. Now people from all socioeconomic backgrounds will have the ability to pursue higher education.

Some schools argue that innovation can be stifled because they don’t have access to the same resources that a school like Harvard does. American universities continue to dominate “best university” lists in part because of their research departments, which can be highly costly to maintain.

Leading MOOC provider edX, will begin to charge for professional education courses starting next year. So far, five courses have been announced and the fees range from $49 to $1,249.

The five professional education courses so far are in cyber-security, energy, sustainability, healthcare, innovation, and laboratory safety. These courses will begin in 2015 and will be offered by Rice University, MIT, and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Anant Agarwal, edX CEO, says that the edX platform will enable its member organizations to offer professional courses much less expensively than through traditional methods and will reach a broader and larger base of learners. What edX offers its learners is flexible scheduling and timing, courses that will run for only a few weeks or even days.

Education, like pretty much everything else in our lives these days, is driven by data. Our childrens’ data. The data collection begins even before he steps into the school.

In the last decade, the United States government has handed states more than $600 million to create a giant database, known as a “statewide longitudinal data system.” The idea is that “if we could keep track of our kids from kindergarten to 12th grade we'd have a much greater handle on what's working, what's not working, what needs to be added to the curriculum.”

But The government isn’t the only one gobbling up data about your kid. Knewton claims to gather millions of data points on millions of children each day. “We literally know everything about what you know and how you learn best, everything (...) We have five orders of magnitude more data about you than Google has,” says Jose Ferreira, Knewton’s CEO.

Scientists Can Now Go To School To Learn How To Save The WorldFast Company

A new Caltech program will fund researchers making renewable energy breakthroughs--and teach them business lessons to get their ideas out of the lab.

Earlier this month, Caltech admitted its first class of post-doctoral Resnick Sustainability Institute fellows, a group chosen to work on some of the fundamental science that could one day transform the American energy landscape.

The program's executive director Neil Fromer is the first to acknowledge that if scientists want to make their energy pitches compelling, they’ll also need business lessons.

This year’s Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three Japanese scientists for the invention of blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs), a technology that has touched society in innumerable ways.

Without blue LEDs, the world wouldn’t have backlit smartphones, TV and computer LCD screens, Blu-ray players, many forms of lighting, and countless other technological marvels.

LEDs are now being explored for their potential to transmit data from the Internet across open space, similar to WiFi. Such a system could transmit a lot more data than WiFi alone. This high bandwidth is possible because LEDs can turn on and offmillions of times per second.